Collective Trauma

This article was first published on the "Caesura" page.

When a group of people lives through some overwhelming, shattering event or condition, it is not only that each of them may individually suffer the effects and aftermath of trauma; the group itself undergoes a transformation that is, in certain respects, not unlike psychological trauma. The term generally used for such events is "collective trauma."

Collective trauma, however, should not be understood merely as the numerical sum of individual traumas. It is beyond doubt that many of those exposed to war, repression, massacre, exile, and the like may be wounded in the full psychological sense of the word — but in collective trauma, it is not only the psyches of individuals that are wounded; a group's image of itself, of its past and its future, of the human world and its place within history, also collapses.

Although we can distinguish among different varieties of collective trauma — historical, social, cultural, or intergenerational — this piece concentrates chiefly on the cultural and meaning-bearing dimension of collective trauma.

Catastrophic events such as war, famine, pandemic, or severe economic crisis shake the foundations of the social order. And yet, so long as a society's meaning-making systems remain relatively intact, such events may not crystallize into collective trauma. Trauma reaches the collective level when a social crisis becomes a cultural crisis as well — that is, when the pain and suffering strike at the very core of a population's understanding of its own identity.

Collective trauma is not simply the outcome of a group's having suffered; it is the outcome of a bitter event or condition having, in the belief of that group's members, threatened one or more foundational components of their culture — its values, its worldviews, its norms, its underlying assumptions. Catastrophes such as chronic repression, genocide, massacre, and severe, systematic discrimination — insofar as they take direct aim at a society's cultural system itself — are more likely to produce collective trauma.

This form of trauma generally carries three important characteristics: first, it is bound up with an intensely negative emotional charge; second, it threatens the very existence of the society, or violates its foundational cultural assumptions; and third, it cannot easily be erased from collective memory.

Negative Affect

One of the most important threads connecting trauma at the micro level to trauma at the macro level is affect. Just as, in psychological trauma, various negative emotions coalesce into intense anxiety and throw the order of a person's mind and body into disarray, so too in collective trauma intense emotions — shame, above all, but also rage, resentment, and terror — become bound to the event and come to define it.

Although the intensity and character of a society's emotional response to an event shifts across different periods, its negative emotional charge remains, like a brand of shame, lodged for a long time — if not forever — within the people's historical memory. This is why such events come to be spoken of as "national shame," "public scandal," or "an eternal stain."

The Threat to Cultural Identity

One of the principal similarities between individual trauma and collective trauma lies in an initial inability to digest the experience. Both are the product of something too sudden, too violent, too humiliating, or too meaningless to absorb.

As with individual trauma, in collective trauma too, meanings are lost in painful ways — but here the question is no longer only what happened to "us" as a collection of separate individuals. Now the question concerns the social "we": Who were we, as a society? What did we trust? What of our world collapsed? Can we still place our trust in the law, in home, in language, in the future, in the homeland, in justice, or in other human beings?

Seen this way, collective trauma is always bound up not only with an ambiguity of meaning but with a contest over meaning. Different groups may fail to agree even on the event itself — on who the victims are, who is to blame, what should be remembered, and what should be forgotten. For some, an event is catastrophe in its fullest sense; for others, it is merely a necessary cost, a human error, an exaggeration, or even something not worth retelling at all.

In psychological trauma, the difficulty is often how a crushing experience that has shaken a person's value system can be brought back into their psychic apparatus without submerging them in it all over again. In collective trauma, the difficulty is how a catastrophe that has destroyed the shared, familiar meanings of the collective can find its way into public language without being distorted, appropriated, or neutralized.

Precisely because of the horror of the catastrophe, part of a society may turn away from confronting or acknowledging it. Under such conditions, resistance to the violence itself perpetuates the injury it caused: the wish to normalize, the wish to move quickly past it, the wish to accept that "it wasn't so serious," "it wasn't so big," or "it's over now" — even while, for parts of the society, the wounds are still fresh.

Ineradicable Memory

Just as psychological trauma — if it is not remembered in a coherent way and integrated into a person's psychic organization — manifests instead as unwanted physical and psychological symptoms, so too the effects of collective catastrophes, even when apparently forgotten, cast their shadow over a society's cultural life.

Here, too, in collective trauma, there is something that appears, on its face, paradoxical: in order for a trauma to be recognized and resolved, the members of a society must actively keep its memory alive. A name must be found for it. It must be established what was lost, who was harmed, who bears responsibility, and whether the suffering of those who were harmed finds its way into our shared memory or not.

Seen this way, collective trauma, like psychological trauma, does not remain confined to the past; it enters into the present and becomes part of a society's everyday moral, political, and psychological struggles.

Meanwhile, those groups who either brought about the catastrophe themselves, or who benefit from its being diminished, make use of the instruments available for shaping collective memory — promoting competing narratives, displacing responsibility, blaming the victim, and so on — in order to strip the trauma of its credibility and legitimacy. This makes the task facing survivors and witnesses of the crime — the task of keeping the narratives alive — all the more difficult.

Collective trauma, then, is as much a wound lodged in the past as it is a form of the past's presence here, now. So long as a society cannot accept its losses, cannot find a name for its catastrophe, cannot see its responsibilities fairly, and cannot let the narrative of those who were harmed enter its collective memory, the past is never truly left behind. What has not been acknowledged can, at the individual level, take the form of silence, denial, anger, and fear, and can, at the collective level, be repeated in the form of repression, revenge, and further social injury.

Payvand Jalali, Psychoanalytic Therapist